What Aaron doesn't give due attention to here is that improving existing government transparency is part of a larger information ecosystem. Digitizing previously paper-bound and siloed databases makes possible a new kind of "connect-the-dots" work that used to take investigative journalists months to do--or they simply didn't even try. His own project, Watchdog.net, has pioneered a new way of finding links, or "handshakes" as he called it, between campaign contributors and congressional earmarks, and the demographic data he's cataloged is going to help power new tools for investigative types to answer such questions as "How many members of Congress who represent districts where X percent of their households have experienced a foreclosure last year voted for the banking bailout?"
We're just at the beginning of a new wave of data- and citizen-empowered watchdogging of government, and it would be a huge mistake to discount how valuable these government transparency projects are in opening up the process in fundamentally new ways. Yes, it's true that government still wants to hide its dirt and the data it discloses is often only part of the picture. But the more we open access to the existing data and involve people in connecting the dots, the greater the appetite and demand for even more transparency, of the sort even Aaron might find useful.
Indeed, and there are real examples of local reporters uncovering corrupt congressman based on data in these public records. This is a lot harder if they have to travel to DC and sit in a basement reading room to pore over paper ledgers.
Where 'harder' is 'more expensive' and we know that the present newspaper model doesn't look like it can support expensive endeavors. Investigative journalism in the info age is only possible if those practicing it have info age tools.
Well, yes, but "harder" as in "more difficult" too. It's basically impossible to do anything useful with data stored in a paper ledger that's only available in a basement reading room a few hours a day and copies cost $0.15 a page.
This assumes that the public databases actually contain any information that will allow you to connect the dots. Aaron's claim seems to be that they mostly contain fluff that has nothing to do with the actual functioning of the government. That's why you have to investigate and uncover rather than simply analyze to get to the truth.
Yes. Yhe definition of the word "news" has been expanded to include anything that seems new. The other way of looking at it is to limit it to "things someone doesn't want you to announce." The argument in this article is that these databases are full only of data that people want you to announce. So how useful can it really be?
> We're just at the beginning of a new wave of data- and citizen-empowered watchdogging of government
Back in the mid 90s, a company called Hamilton Securities created an online tool for analyzing flows of government money at the local level. It didn't work out so well for them:
Databases of campaign contributions and legislative data are just tools. Posting the data (which is supposedly already "public," but is often hidden in a basement somewhere) online doesn't sprinkle fairy dust over the capital.
But people can (and do) use these tools to write books like the ones he links, and to pull data from different sources to uncover specific acts of corruption and malfeasance.
Databases are just as useful to reporters and authors as anonymous leaks and insider sources.
"The real action is buried in obscure subchapters of innocuous-sounding bills and voted on under emergency provisions that let everything happen without public disclosure."
Doesn't sound like transparency to me. The authors point seems to be that efforts to be transparent, aren't actually. If Congress and others are hiding the 'good stuff', we need to work on making that transparent.
That would never work. To start with, you can't stop members of Congress from associating with each other. If you said "you get one week every 2 years to pass everything", the entire congress would spend 1 year and 51 weeks in secret meetings trying to figuring out what to vote for in their 1 week of voting time.
All that would happen as a result is there would be a 2 year back log of legislation, and it would take FOREVER for anything to get done.
The only real way to deal with corruption in government is to limit it's power. As long as there are people in power, some of them are going to become corrupt. That's just human nature. The best you can do is limit power, so that the damage they can do is minimized.
> you can't stop members of Congress from associating with each other.
Actually, many states have open meeting laws where, if it becomes clear that politicians met and discussed certain topics, it is a crime, and it's punishable.
They don't often get used, but I think that the threat does alter behavior at least a bit.
I'd like to read about these, particularly about how they could be Constitutional, but I can't seem to find the correct words for a Google search. Would you post a link, or possibly a set of words to search for?
Seemingly arbitrary limits on the time/compensation of legislators might have more of an effect than you think. The Texas legislature meets only once every two years, and its session is constitutionally limited to 140 days.
The California legislature seems to meet constantly, and regularly spends time in extended sessions trying to pass overdue budgets in a never-ending fiscal crisis. California doesn't get any benefit from the extra official time its legislators put in, and Texas legislators aren't busy preplanning legislation the entire time they're out of session.
Given the fickleness of public opinion, there are natural limits as to how much planning months' ahead of time can help.
AIUI, one reason California is in a constant fiscal crisis is that it takes a supermajority to raise taxes and other constitutional provisions mandate how a certain proportion of the budget should be spent. So it's much harder for California legislators to negotiate a budget than for Texas legislators.
Real transparency would amount to such a large change in the system that it's unrealistic to think it can be tacked on. The scope of work is too large.
Aaron has noticed that a simple goal like "transparency" can't be immediately, directly implemented, because the system is such that it's like trying to dig a hole in water. Of course, you can put a hole in water, since that's what a boat is, but doing it incrementally (a piece here, a piece there, then bailing out the water, checking for leaks, etc) is going to be much more difficult than just building a boat out of the water and putting it in. Activists always seem to start out wanting to "just make these specific changes" from within the system, and that usually works, in general, when the changes are in the direction the system is already going, "with the flow," as it were.
If you want to make a change that is against the flow, it's far, far easier to make the change away from the system and then drop it in so that the system (government, a corporation, a church, or whatever) is forced to deal with it whole.
This is a very interesting topic: part economics, part psychology, part politics, and more; I've spent a lot of time thinking about it over the last 10 years, but I am just an egg, understanding little. :)
Re-reading, I notice that this is still unclear, so what I'm saying is that we need to focus on solutions that are primarily technical, because social and political solutions almost never work in the first place and tend to roll back as soon as the pressure lets up. The internet is killing copyright in a way that we anti-copyright folk would never have been able to do with "education" and "reform".
what I'm saying is that we need to focus on solutions that are primarily technical, because social and political solutions almost never work in the first place
Really? I think the opposite. I can think of very few times where a social problem has been solved purely by technology.
(Anyway, I think the real answer is you need to attack the problem on all fronts at once)
We're just at the beginning of a new wave of data- and citizen-empowered watchdogging of government, and it would be a huge mistake to discount how valuable these government transparency projects are in opening up the process in fundamentally new ways. Yes, it's true that government still wants to hide its dirt and the data it discloses is often only part of the picture. But the more we open access to the existing data and involve people in connecting the dots, the greater the appetite and demand for even more transparency, of the sort even Aaron might find useful.
(My collegue Micah Sifry wrote this with me)